Doh!!! The 10 Most Overlooked Security Tasks

Here's a list of gotchas that often slip past overburdened security pros.

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Security pros are under siege. Just in the last weeks we discovered major vulnerabilities in basic hardware chips, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Hacking from nation-states continues unabated, prompting fears that it will deter our ability to have safe elections later this year. And now, even the basics can go wrong as was displayed last week when the power went out at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

There’s big money on the line. Ponemon estimated the average cost of a breach in 2017 at $3.62 million, but the cost to a company can be much more than financial. Damage to the brand and public perception is often hard to judge.

And then there’s security holes you may not have thought about – or seem so obvious that you considered them handled years ago – like making sure the company has a back-up generator on hand for its data center.

In interviews with three security experts, we developed a list of 10 gotchas that may not lock the organization down for good, but will go a long way to making sure you can sleep at night. They range from being ever more vigilant about phishing emails and DNS calls to taking more care about deleting accounts when an employee leaves. The latter can be a real headache because merely deleting a user from Active Directory doesn’t cut it any more.

To develop the list we spoke to John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute; Christos Dimitriadis, head of security for Greece’s INTRALOT Group; and Stephen Cobb, senior security researcher at ESET.

Steve Zurier has more than 30 years of journalism and publishing experience, most of the last 24 of which were spent covering networking and security technology. Steve is based in Columbia, Md. View Full Bio

This is a strong list that includes technical controls, as well as human actions, to help reduce the attack surface. #11 would be seeking out ongoing professional development and practice opportunities in interactive environments. The traditional security trainings that exist at industry conferences or week-long seminars are no longer enough to prepare our cyber pros. Practicing defensive and offensive techniques – in real-world scenarios with your own tools and team members – is key to keeping yourself sharp and up to date on emerging threats.

Understandably, many corporations sense crushed with the burden of overlaying all components of IT safety. So what are the safety responsibilities that need to be prioritized with the aid of companies to make certain that they may be secure? Assignment Writer UK

Data breach fears and the need to comply with regulations such as GDPR are two major drivers increased spending on security products and technologies. But other factors are contributing to the trend as well. Find out more about how enterprises are attacking the cybersecurity problem by reading our report today.

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